JOURNALOF NEUROPHYSIOLOGY Vol. 41, No. 4, July 1978. Prinred in U.S.A. Physiological Consequences for the Cat’s Visual Cortex of Effectively Restricting Early Visual Experience With Oriented Contours MICHAEL P. STRYKER, HELEN SHERK, AUDIE G. LEVENTHAL, AND HELMUT V. B. HIRSCH Department of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; and Center for Neurobiology, State University of New York, Albany, New York 12222 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 1. The early visual experience of nine cats was restricted to viewing horizontal or vertical lines inside opaque goggles. 2. When the kittens were 3-4 mo old, extracellular recordings were made in the primary visual cortex. To obtain a repre- sentative sample of cortical cells, units were studied at regularly spaced intervals along the course of electrode penetrations travel- ing oblique to the cortical surface. An automated assessment of preferred orienta- tion using a computer-driven optical display was employed, and during the recording ses- sion the experimenters did not know which orientation(s) each animal had viewed in early life. 3. In the cats that viewed horizontal lines with one eye and vertical lines with the other during rearing, two major findings of previous workers (14) were confirmed. First, a majority of units were not selective for orientation. Second, units with preferred orientations near vertical tended to be ac- tivated exclusively by the eye that had viewed vertical, and likewise for horizontal. 4. In cats that viewed lines of the same orientation with both eyes during rearing, a substantially smaller proportion of units were selective for orientation; the preferred orientations of these units also tended to match the orientation to which the cats had been exposed. 5. Portions of some electrode penetra- Received for publication 22 December, 1977. tions showed an orderly arrangement of cells according to preferred orientation simi- lar to that seen in normal cats, but with regions over which only nonselective cells were found. Many penetrations appeared less orderly. 6. The results are consistent with a role for early visual experience in maintaining the responsiveness and innate selectivity of cortical neurons, although they cannot en- tirely rule out the possibility that experience may alter or determine the preferred orien- tation of some cells. INTRODUCTION Some response properties of cells in the cat’s visual cortex can be modified by re- stricting early visual experience. This was first demonstrated in 1963 by Wiesel and Hubel(36), who showed that the relative ef- fectiveness of the two eyes in activating cortical cells could be changed by prevent- ing vision through one eye; in kittens reared this way almost all cells could be activated only through the eye that had remained open (21, 36). In 1970 Hirsch and Spinelli (13) reported that another aspect of cortical organization, the distribution of orientation of elongated receptive fields, could be modified by re- stricting a kitten’s early visual experience to a pattern of parallel stripes. In these experiments, each kitten viewed an array of three horizontal stripes with one eye and three vertical stripes with the other, so 896 0022-3077/78/0000-0000$01.25 Copyright 0 1978 The American Physiological Society